In a recent blog posted on "Publishing Frontier," Josephe J. Esposito makes the case that the Kindle in particular, and ebooks in general, will decrease the numbers of books sold because only books readers want to read at the moment will be purchased as opposed to those we think we may want to read at some future time. You can read his entire post at pubfrontier.com/2008/10/21/how-the-kindle-and-its-kin-will-reduce-book-sales/ Esposito claims that the book publishing industry has for years depended upon selling lots of books no one ever reads and that the emergence of ebooks will save readers money at the expense of pubishers and, thus, authors. That could be true if, an only if, readers do not read more books than previously, because of the ease of the new technology, and if publishers do not then follow up with books readers actually do want to read as opposed to store and display. All of this has much less bearing on self-published books than on books published by the general book trade because self-published books tend to have niche markets and are promoted specifically to those markets. Like textbooks, which may also benefit from ebook publishing, they represent less of an impulse buy than an intentional purchasing decision. As it has been with every other innovation in our ongoing technologically fueled remaking of how we communicate and how we learn, it will all unfold in ways we can only guess and in some that have not yet even occurred to us.